. Printing and writing materials: their evolution . F PROCESSES Babyloniaand Assyria. Clay tab-lets, cones,and cylin-ders. A LTHOUGH in Europe printing from movable^^ types dates from the middle of the fifteenthcentury, the transfer of form by impression isone of the oldest of the arts. In Babylonia andAssyria, letters, pictures, and arbitrary signs werestamped on soft clay which was afterwards the ruins of the buildings of these ancientpeoples, there has been found scarcely a stoneor a kiln-burnt brick without an inscription or astamp. The inscriptions on the stone were prob-ably mad
. Printing and writing materials: their evolution . F PROCESSES Babyloniaand Assyria. Clay tab-lets, cones,and cylin-ders. A LTHOUGH in Europe printing from movable^^ types dates from the middle of the fifteenthcentury, the transfer of form by impression isone of the oldest of the arts. In Babylonia andAssyria, letters, pictures, and arbitrary signs werestamped on soft clay which was afterwards the ruins of the buildings of these ancientpeoples, there has been found scarcely a stoneor a kiln-burnt brick without an inscription or astamp. The inscriptions on the stone were prob-ably made with a chisel, but those on thebricks were made either from wooden stampscut in relief or by the separate impressions ofsome pointed instrument. The bricks show vari-ous shapes: square or oblong tablets, cones, andcylinders, the latter often of considerable of the tablets are not more than one inchlong; others found in the ruins of the palace ofNineveh measure 9 by 6^ inches. The cuneiform(wedge-shaped or arrow-headed) characters on(6). BABYLONIAN TABLET WITH CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTION. Size of the Original (2 x S% inches) in the Museum of Drexel Institute. ANCIENT RELIEF PROCESSES most of the tablets are sharp and well-defined,but in some cases they are so minute as to bealmost illegible without the aid of a magnifyingglass. Whole Hbraries were formed of such bricks. clay books, as they may be called, werearranged according to their subjects, numbered,catalogued, and placed in charge of Hbraries were public property, and wereintended for the instruction of the people. Eachof the principal cities of Babylonia and Assyriapossessed a library of this kind, of which the greatnational library of Assur bani pal (Greek, Sardana-palus), at Nineveh, was the most famous. Largenumbers of the tablets found in Assur bani palspalace have been placed in the British of the catalogue have also been found,and show that the library contained:
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectbookbin, bookyear1901
